OAXACA STATE

Located in the south of Mexico, Oaxaca is one of the country’s poorest and most topographically and ethnically diverse states. Together with Guerrero, it is one of two states where EPR guerrillas have been most active and where authorities have reacted most harshly to suspected members of the group. The Loxicha region of Oaxaca became the focal point for the government’s search for EPR members after Fidel Martínez, a former treasurer of San Agustín Loxicha, was killed in an EPR attack on a naval base on August 28, 1996. On that same day, the EPR attacked several targets throughout Mexico.

Unlike the EZLN in Chiapas, the EPR has conducted periodic armed attacks against government targets since its first armed appearance. In response, the government appears to have developed a strategy designed to obtain information from sources at all costs, while weakening the political or peasant-based organizations that authorities believe are linked to the guerrilla movement. In the cases documented below, torture and false confessions were used to implicate people as members of the guerrilla group. For the most part, neither prosecutors nor judges expressed concern about the abusive manner in which suspects came into custody or the torture suffered by detainees. In fact, the proceedures used by prosecutors ranged ranged from the highly questionable to the deeply disturbing. In several torture cases documented by the Mexico City-based Christian Action to Abolish Torture (Acción de los Cristianos para Abolir la Tortura, ACAT), prosecutors took no action on their own to investigate, despite medical records showing that the detainees had been tortured.

On September 25, soldiers and state and federal police carried out raids leading to the arrest of eleven people from San Agustín Loxicha, including the mayor and much of the town council. Over the following months, joint police-military operations netted further detainees. According to a group of Mexican NGOs and a defense lawyer handling Oaxaca cases, officials arbitrarily detained 127 people—torturing one hundred of them—and carried out thirty-two illegal searches and five executions.177 In researching this report, our fieldwork focused on four representative torture and false-prosecution cases and an extrajudicialexecution. The picture that emerges is one of uncontrolled abuse of force in the name of fighting the EPR, combined with a lack of concern on the part of officials throughout the justice system.

The abuses documented in the context of anti-EPR counterinsurgency are not the only human rights abuses that take place in Oaxaca. For this reason, we supplement our fieldwork with eight torture cases handled by the CNDH between 1990 and 1996, concluding that the problems identified in the EPR-related cases investigated by Human Rights Watch are neither new nor unique.

The Loxicha Region: Abuses in the Search for EPR Suspects

Illegal detention, forced confession, and torture

One of several sweeps through the Loxichas region occurred on November 7, 1996, three months after coordinated EPR attacks took place in several Mexican states. Nineteen people were arrested. Illegal arrests were followed by torture and prosecution. After his eventual release, one of the victims, Amadeo Valencia Juárez, explained to Human Rights Watch the circumstances of his detention and the torture to which he was subjected:

At 5:00 a.m. on November 7 I heard footsteps outside, then banging on my door. Men dressed in black uniforms broke in and starting asking, “where are your guns.” Then they searched the house. They took me to the municipal government building, where they made me kneel on the ground with my hands behind my head; the army was there, along with state and federal judicial police. At around 6:00 a.m., they took nine of us to the San Martín Ranch. They threatened to kill me, but left me and several others on the truck while they beat the ones they took off the truck. At around 5:00 p.m. they took all of us to Crucesita, where they kept us in a small, dark room for two days without giving us any food or water. We used bags and empty bottles if we had to go to the bathroom.

They kept asking me to incriminate other people as members of the EPR and to sign blank sheets of paper. I refused. It was there that they started to beat me. They stripped me and attached electrodes to my testicles. “You’re a member of the armed group,” they said. “I’ll let you go if you accuse your compañeros.” On November 8, they tortured me again, promising to let me go if I signed blank sheets of paper, but this time they threatened to kill my family if I didn’t. So, I signed the blankpages. But they didn’t let me go. I spent nine months in Ixtotel prison in Oaxaca, then five months in Almoloya in Mexico state.178

Similarly, Gerardo Ramírez Hernández told Human Rights Watch that his captors repeatedly ordered him to accuse other detainees, then forced him to sign blank sheets of paper.179

Questionable or illegally obtained statements were then used by proscutors in building their case. For instance, court documents confirm that a prosecutor used the statements of three detainees who accused another man of direct EPR participation, even though the detainees’s declarations were made in Spanish, a language they do not speak; none of the three had a translator.180 Prosecutors also used hearsay testimony against Prisciliano Enríquez Luna: one of the detainees testified that he had been told that Enríquez Luna was a member of the EPR; based on that evidence and his own forced declaration, Enríquez Luna spent a year in jail.181

The prosecutor in these cases alleged that the detainees had been arrested while at his office. He said he had issued the arrest warrants himself, without going to a judge, according to a lawyer for several of the detainees.182 Using “urgency” provisions in the criminal code, the prosecutor argued—contradictorily—that the suspects had voluntarily gone to the prosecutors’ office but that they would flee if he did not arrest them then and there. Without wasting time considering the detainees’ mutually reinforcing allegations of the mass arrest and subsequent torture, the judge accepted the prosecutor’s story. The judge did so despite evidence that the prosecutor had falsely accused at least some of the detainees, bringing into question the prosecutor’s actions in the case. In other cases, the judge accepted retracted confessions on the grounds that the detainees had failed to prove that they were retracting their statements because of physical and psychological threats.183

After winning an appeal, six of the November 7, 1996, detainees were released a year later, a positive development given the procedures used againstthem. The judge threw out statements falsely attributed to the men who did not speak Spanish, because they did not have a translator.184 He made no comment, however, regarding what kind of procedure could have been used to obtain such declarations. The cases raises serious concern about how the prosecutions could have moved forward in the first place, and why accusations of torture were not investigated. Roberto Antonio Juárez, Priciliano Enríquez Luna, and Virgilio Cruz Luna were released without charge, but their accusations of torture—supported by medical documentation—were not investigated until they were released. Only after ACAT took up the cases did prosecutors begin to investigate, but ACAT was required to conduct much of the research that would permit the investigation to move forward. Given that authorities did not move on the case while the victims were in detention, the prosecutor rightly argued that, after their release, it was much harder to locate them for investigation-related interviews.

Extrajudicial execution

On April 24, 1997, Celerino Jiménez Almaraz died in Santa María Jalatengo, San Mateo Río Hondo municipality. According to his wife, he was arbitrarily detained and executed. According to police, the man ambushed police officers and died after being wounded in an armed confrontation. In our investigation, we found compelling evidence that the man was, in fact, executed by police. At this writing, authorities have done little to clarify the incident.

María Estela García Ramírez, who was married to the victim, explained to Human Rights Watch how police entered her home on the night of April 24, shooting into the air and then following her husband as he tried to flee.

They didn’t ask for anyone in particular. My husband tried to run, but they shot him in the left foot. He made it out the door, but I didn’t know how much farther he got. Later, we followed the trail of small drops of blood to a place where there was a lot of blood and regurgitated food.185

Police gave a completely different story to investigators. According to a report filed by two state judicial police group leaders, sixteen state judicial police agents gathered at midnight in Santa María Jalatengo to begin a hike to Juquilita, San Agustín Loxicha, in order to serve two arrest warrants. The police divided into two groups, one of which included five officers. According to testimony from thepolice, about ninety minutes into the strenuous hike, the first group was ambushed, and the five officers responded by throwing themselves to the ground, returning the fire, and calling for support from the second group. The assailants moved from about twenty meters to four or five meters from the police before the shooting ended. When it did, the police said, they found an injured Jiménez Almaraz. According to several police statements, officers “immediately” carried him back to the trucks at Jalatengo.186

On June 6, one of the group leaders who initially reported on the attack filed an additional report, adding a detail that had not been mentioned by any of the officers who had given testimonies after the incident. According to officer Hugo T. Chávez Cervantes, when police discovered the injured man, they asked his name and where he lived, and were told that he lived in Los Limares. “So we proceeded to interview people who live in the community, to see if they knew a Celerino Jiménez Almaraz, which they strongly denied.” Chávez continued that only after conducting these interviews did they proceed back to the trucks at Jalatengo.187 According to the police, Jiménez Almaraz died while being transported back to town.

The physical evidence was consistent with an execution, not a death in a shoot-out in the dark. According to the medical examiner, the body had seven seven-millimeter holes formed in a circle with a twenty-centimeter radius in the front left side of the thorax. The left forearm bore five seven-millimeter bullet wounds. The trajectory of the bullets was from up to down.188 This finding suggests that Jiménez Almaraz was shot at close range by someone with the time to aim carefully, not at all the circumstances described by the police in their reports. Further evidence that the man was executed came from the prosecutor himself, who examined the body and reported that the wounds on the thorax showed a “gunpowder tattoo” and that those of the forearm were “impregnated with gunpowder.”189 Gunpowder markings such as these could only result from close-range firing, not the four or five meters that police say was the closest they got to the alleged assailants when they were exchanging gunfire. Also inconsistent with the suggestion of a shoot-out was the prosecutor’s inability to find bulletcasings when he examined the site of the alleged confrontation the following day.190

On the evening following the incident, the prosecutor began a murder investigation. However, the same judicial police officers involved in the confrontation, from Pochutla, were assigned to carry out the investigation, in an obvious conflict of interest. The Fray Francisco de Vitoria Center for Human Rights (Centro de Derechos Humanos “Fray Francisco de Vitoria”), which had been handling the case on behalf of the victim’s wife, asked state prosecutors to transfer responsibility for the investigation from Pochutla to the state attorney general’s central office in Oaxaca city. At the same time, the center provided an address in Oaxaca to receive all notifications of official, case-related actions, such as requests the prosecutors might make to interview witnesses.191

In November 1997, the attorney general’s office shifted responsibility for the case to Oaxaca investigators but notified the center neither of the change in oversight nor of February 1998 summonses for Jiménez Almaraz’s family members to testify, even though the center legally represented the family. Similarly, authorities did not notify the center of a summons for Jiménez Almaraz’s widow, which had been left with her family members in rural Oaxaca, an area to which the widow, fearing for her safety, had not returned since shortly after the attack that killed her husband. By failing to utilize the Oaxaca city address, prosecutors effectively ensured that the human rights group would not be able to assist the victim’s family members and make sure they were not coerced during their testimonies, and it guaranteed that the victim’s widow would not learn of the summons for her to testify. It was not until September 1998, when a center staff person based in Mexico City visited the family, that the center learned of the summonses and brought the widow to testify.192 A request made by the center in September 1998 to obtain a copy of the case file was rejected by the prosecutor, thereby making the center’s examination of the prosecutor’s actions difficult and impeding the center from submitting case documents to intergovernmental or international human rights organizations.

The National Human Rights Commission in Oaxaca

Consistent with the pattern found in CNDH cases from other states, torture in cases in Oaxaca often followed arbitrary arrest and incommunicado detention. In many Oaxaca torture cases, medical examiners failed to document abuses or prosecutors failed to initiate torture investigations, or both. The victims, however, were consistently prosecuted for crimes they may or may not have committed, while judges rarely paid attention to the procedural irregularities or torture documented during the process.

As of June 1998, based on the most recent CNDH information available, no torturer has been sentenced based on CNDH recommendations related to Oaxaca. In three cases, federal prosecutors decided not to press charges, sometimes based on questionable reasoning suggesting that the victim had been pressured into changing his story. For instance, Federal Judicial Police agents arbitrarily detained Donato Geminiano Martínez on August 17, 1993, torturing him in order to force him to confess to a drug-related crime.193 The federal prosecutor failed to investigate the torture, despite the evident wounds.194 The first medical exam carried out on August 17, when Martínez was first picked up, showed no signs of physical mistreatment; an exam after the incommunicado detention showed signs of torture.195 After the CNDH issued its recommendation in May 1995, the PGR began an investigation, but reported that Martínez retracted his earlier allegation that he had been tortured, saying instead that he had received his wounds in a motorcycle accident the day before his arrest.196 However, the motorcycle incident would not have explained why medical exams documented bruises only after he had been in detention, nor why the initial prosecutor had failed to investigate the allegations of torture.

Torture prosecutions were not even successful in cases in which medical documentation showed signs of torture. State judicial police detained Otilio López Aragón and Armando López Pimentel on October 20, 1992, holding them illegally for two days and torturing them to induce self-incriminating statements.197 Medicalexams confirmed the torture. In its 1996 annual report, the CNDH reported that three officers had been charged with “abuse of authority,” not torture, but no arrest warrant had been executed.198 On May 10, 1996, the officers voluntarily turned themselves in, but they were released with a warning.199

In one of the only CNDH Oaxaca cases in which authorities were punished in relation to torture, the victim was so badly injured that he later died of his wounds. On December 3, 1995, Federal Judicial Police in Salina Cruz detained Rafael Toledo Nolasco, whom they accused of having drugs and a weapon reserved for the exclusive use of the armed forces.200 They beat him so severely during the detention and later at the attorney general’s office that he died a month later. Before he died, however, he was turned over to a federal prosecutor, charged, and transferred to a detention center. Prosecutors never questioned why he was in such a precarious physical condition, and decided not to press charges against the officers.201 After the CNDH issued Recommendation 106/96 on November 6, 1996, detailing the problems in the case, the Office of the Federal Attorney General suspended for thirty days the prosecutor who failed to investigate Toledo Nolasco’s physical condition. They fired the prosecutors who decided not to press charges against the police, ordering that they be barred from working for the institution for ten years. The two police officers were fired and eventually charged with torture and murder. A judge issued arrest warrants for the men, but the former officers fled and remain at large.202

Additional Cases Documented by the CNDH

· Federal Judicial Police detained and tortured Rufino José Jiménez on October 7, 1991, forcing him under torture to sign a self-incriminating statement, according to the CNDH. He was indicted, prosecuted, and sentenced for possession and sale of marijuana, possession of marijuana seeds, andpossession of a weapon reserved for the use of the army.203 The prosecutor never investigated Jiménez’s allegation that he was tortured. The PGR decided not to press charges against the police, citing an assertion by the victim’s defense lawyer to the effect that his defendant was not tortured during interrogation and that Jiménez had told him that his wounds had been caused during a struggle over a weapon with one of the arresting agents.204

· On August 28, 1993, municipal authorities in San Miguel Huautepec, and the son of one of them, tortured sixteen-year-old Tomás José Gómez Guerrero, tying his hands and feet, hitting him, and subjecting him to mock execution.205 The men accused the youth of having hit a municipal police officer. Two days later, he was turned over to a nearby state prosecutor, who failed to document the physical evidence of the beating Gómez Guerrero had suffered, even though a medical examiner had already certified the wounds.206 Gómez Guerrero was prosecuted for allegedly having hit the police officer. Arrest warrants were eventually issued against two of the authorities, for abuse of authority and illegal detention, but an appeals judge ruled that the warrants should not be executed.207

178 Human Rights Watch interview, Amadeo Valencia Juárez, January 28, 1998, Oaxaca, Oaxaca.

179 Human Rights Watch interview, Gerardo Ramírez Hernández, January 28, 1998, Oaxaca, Oaxaca.

180 Sentence in criminal case 316/97-II, December 5, 1997, p. 111.

181 Ibid., p. 113.

182 Human Rights Watch interview, Israel Ochoa, January 28, 1998, Oaxaca, Oaxaca.

183 Ibid., p. 104.

184 Ibid., p. 111.

185 Human Rights Watch interview, María Estela García Ramírez, Mexico City, September 3, 1997.

186 The police version of events is taken from internal police documents filed by officers after the incident and by statements made to prosecutors.

187 Hugo T. Chávez Cervantes, report filed with the director of the State Judicial Police, June 6, 1997.

188 Autopsy report on Celerino Jiménez Almaraz, April 24, 1997.

189 Prosecutor’s report on transport of cadaver, April 24, 1997.

190 Prosecutor’s report on physical inspection of the scene, April 24, 1997.

191 The center is based in Mexico City and does not maintain an office in Oaxaca. It provided the address of a Oaxacan human rights group to receive official notifications.

192 Human Rights Watch interview, Adriana Carmona, Centro de Derechos Humanos “Fray Francisco de Vitoria,” Washington, DC, December 6, 1998.

193 National Human Rights Commission, Recommendation 57/95, in Gaceta 58 (Mexico City: Comisión Nacional de Derechos Humanos, May 1995), pp. 47 and 52.

194 Ibid., p. 52.

195 Ibid.

196 National Human Rights Commission, Informe anual mayo 1996-mayo 1997, pp. 493-94.

197 National Human Rights Commission, Recommendation 172/93, in Gaceta 39 (Mexico City: Comisión Nacional de Derechos Humanos, October 1993), pp. 105 and 110-11.

198 National Human Rights Commission, Informe anual mayo 1995-mayo 1996, p. 354.

199 National Human Rights Commission, Informe anual mayo 1996-mayo 1997, p. 403.

200 National Human Rights Commission, Recommendation 106/96, in Gaceta 76 (Mexico City: Comisión Nacional de Derechos Humanos, November 1996).

201 Ibid.

202 Office of the Federal Attorney General, “Resultados obtenidos por la Procuraduría General de la República en materia de lucha contra la impunidad y de los trabajos de la CNDH,” document prepared for Human Rights Watch, June 1998.

203 National Human Rights Commission, Recommendation 8/94, in Gaceta 45 (Mexico City: Comisión Nacional de Derechos Humanos, April 1994), pp. 74-75.

204 National Human Rights Commission, Informe anual mayo 1995-mayo 1996, pp. 401-02.

205 National Human Rights Commission, Recommendation 39/94, in Gaceta 45 (Mexico City: Comisión Nacional de Derechos Humanos, April 1994), p. 360.

206 Ibid., p. 367.

207 National Human Rights Commission, Informe anual mayo 1994-mayo 1995, p. 469-70.